Press

Since its creation in 2003, 4chan has grown to become one of the world's largest forums, serving approximately 680,000,000 page impressions to over 22,000,000 unique visitors per month (~11 MM in the US). The website is mainly popular amongst young adults, and its imageboard format is based fully on user-generated content. Users post in a variety of interest-themed imageboards, including Video Games, Anime, Lifestyle and Technology.

4chan.org is one of the highest-trafficked US sites according to Alexa and Quantcast, and is ranked by Big-Boards as being the 2nd largest BBS in the world. 4chan is credited with spawning a number of wildly popular internet memes, including LOLcats, the rapid rise to popularity of Tay "Chocolate Rain" Zonday, and "Rickrolling"—among many others.

In the news, 2009

2009 TIME 100 Honoree

4chan's "moot" was selected by TIME's editors as one of the TIME 100, an annual list of "The World's Most Influential People," in the Builders & Titans category. In addition, readers voted
moot as "The World's Most Influential Person" in an online poll held on TIME.com.

Memes

LOLcats / "Caturday"

"The term lolcat gained national media attention in the United States when it was covered by Time, which wrote that non-commercialized phenomena of the sort are increasingly rare, stating that lolcats have 'a distinctly old-school, early 1990s, Usenet feel to [them].'"

Rickrolling

"In a rickroll a person provides a link they claim is relevant to the topic at hand which actually takes the user to the Rick Astley video. ... By May 2007 the practice had become widespread, and it eventually began to receive some coverage in the mainstream media. ... In a March 2008 interview, Astley said that he found the rickrolling of Scientology to be 'hilarious'..."

Tay "Chocolate Rain" Zonday

"Tay's most notable single is titled 'Chocolate Rain'. The spread of popularity of the song is attributed to 4chan. Tay Zonday said, "I'm pretty sure the 'Chocolate Rain' attention started as a joke at 4chan.org, an image board that is credited with starting lots of popular internet phenomena. It spread to a general audience and people started uploading spoofs. I don't know what causes people to listen to my music. If I could speak it, there would be no reason to write songs.""

"Among the most notorious of forums is one called 4chan, an anarchic, entirely anonymous bulletin board where people are encouraged to post pictures. It is variously credited with fostering not just Rick Rolling, but the LOLCATS craze of cats speaking like hacker kids, and the 'Anonymous' anti-Scientology movement..."

"...has come the blossoming Web 2.0 era of collaborative content. YouTube, Wikipedia, 4chan, abeerintheevening, Facebook – they all function on the principle that everyone has at least one thing that would be of interest and value to a wider audience. The wisdom of the crowd really is starting to look wise, all things told."

"An estimated 13 million internet users have been tricked into watching the video for Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up in the last couple of weeks. In one of those moments of mass online hysteria that record companies wish they could replicate at will, thousands of internet users have been sending out links to scurrilous videos and websites, which actually take you directly to a video of Astley's pop masterpiece."

"Other 4chan memes require more creativity, like the continuing stories around 'Epic Fail Guy', a masked stickman. The plot of the episodes develops over the course of a thread, often with spontaneous reactions from the other users. This manner of storytelling consciously plays with the way image boards work and would be impossible in any other medium." [Translated]